I spent the better part of today remotely trying to figure out why our latest Creative Suite 3 installation was crashing. Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign all crashed when saving. CS3 (Design Premium) was being installed onto a new 24" iMac, everything else with the machine is fine.

For whatever reason, CS3’s shared VersionCueUI.framework component was not installed. Here’s what was showing multiple times in the logs of the problem machine:

Even though we aren’t using Version Cue (I’ve yet to meet anyone who does), that component is necessary for all save functions. If it can’t be called, as I found to be the case here, all CS3 apps will crash out immediately upon invoking Save or Save As. We aren’t installing the Version Cue server on any stations, but I did try installing it once to see if that would fix this. It didn’t.

I re-installed. I repaired. I wiped everything with maccs3clean, restarted and reinstalled — three times. From two different accounts. If you’ve ever installed CS3, you know how much time that eats.

Then I gave up on the installer.

Checking /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0/ against a functioning install showed that VersionCueUI.framework had the wrong byte-count. I decided to try replacing it with a copy from a working installation.

Starting from a working installation, I tgz’d the framework with this command:

tar -cvzf ~/VersionCueUI.framework.tgz VersionCueUI.framework

Next I copied the archive to the machine with the problem install, untarred it, moved the bundle to the right directory and changed ownership to root:admin:

tar xvfzp VersionCueUI.framework.tgz

then

sudo chown -R root:admin VersionCueUI.framework

I’m sure there’s an easy way to integrate user, groups and permissions into the tar commands to save the chown, but after a day of dealing with this I wasn’t in the mood to look it up.

After that, saving from various CS3 appears to be working perfectly and updates installed without errors.

Dusty was first to report success after deleting /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0/. He also paused Adobe Updater to make a copy of the Version Cue installer, Updater will otherwise delete the file after the install fails. That standalone updater now appears to be here: Adobe Version Cue CS3 client 3.1.0 update.

Dave Henderleiter got it working by renaming an older version of Version Cue:

In [/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Version Cue CS3/Client/3.1.0/]… I had a 3.1.0 version and a 3.0.0 version. I deleted the 3.1.0 version and renamed 3.0.0 to 3.1.0 and all the apps worked right away without even a restart.

Faking CS3 into using older component versions makes me nervous, but several people reported success with this method.

I’ve been seeing an issue with Apple Mail affecting several iPhone users on a several different of hosts:

With a POP account, Apple’s Mail.app will ask for the password repeatedly, refuse the correct password and fail to collect any mail.

With IMAP, the account seems to stall and does not necessarily update state or download new messages. Desktop IMAP behavior is particularly erratic.

In both cases, the iPhone continues to work just fine. The problems mostly affects users who’ve set their iPhone to Auto-Check for mail to something other than Manual. The following lines appear in the Desktop’s console.log almost immediately after setting the iPhone to auto-check for mail:

Those entries seem to indicate that the IMAP server is sending a response that Apple Mail doesn’t know what to do with.

A thread on the MacRumors forums claimed this was a multiple connections issue with the mail server, but I think I’ve conclusively debunked that, at least for IMAP.

To test the multiple connection theory, I set up Thunderbird on two other physical machines, one Mac and a Dell running Ubuntu, then set up my account using the default IMAP settings. I also opened my account in Horde webmail and hit reload a lot. Despite those simultaneous connections, Apple Mail seemed to be fine and messages were getting delivered. The little progress indicator was, however, still sitting there next to the account name, not spinning.

So now I can break Apple Mail just by turning on Auto-Check in iPhone’s Settings->Mail. Manual checking from the iPhone doesn’t cause any problems. So far I’m only seeing this on shared hosts running the Courier mail server.

IMAP is inconsistent about when it breaks, maybe relating related to server load issue. POP will break every time: If I check my email on a POP account with the iPhone, Apple Mail will immediately ask for and then refuse the password for that account.

An IMAP workaround

Installing IMAP-IDLE, pretty much fixes the problems with IMAP. I’ve had this running for several hours and the iPhone checking every 15 minutes, and things seem to be working smoothly. IMAP errors still appear in console.log but mail is getting through. I’m going to install this on a few other machines tomorrow and see what happens.

Not sure what to do about POP, but then we’re migrating everyone over to IMAP anyway.

While updating several machines to CS3, one (otherwise identical) machine would not successfully complete the Illustrator 13.0.1 update. I discovered a solution which I posted to Adobe’s forums, where plenty of other people seemed to be running into the same problem. Here’s the text since their support pages are not especially Google-friendly.

After spending way too many hours beating my head against CS3’s lethargic installer, I finally found a fix for the impossible-to-update Illustrator.

I should note that I’ve installed CS3 on a half-dozen machines, five of those installations were flawless (though deathly slow). The remaining one however, on identical hardware, was a disaster. (all were iMac G5s running OSX 10.4.10)

On this one machine, Illustrator would not update to 13.0.1. I’d already given up on Adobe Updater, so I was running the downloaded standalone Illustrator update. It failed every time at “application.sif”. In reading this thread, one line jumped out at me in the Console dump above: “File to add already exists. Need not add.”

Renaming the “application.sif” file inside the Illustrator application allowed the 13.0.1 update to finish. I didn’t delete the file until after the update finished, but I suspect that would work too.

To find that file, open the Illustrator CS3 application bundle (control-click on Illustrator CS3 and choose Show Package Contents). Open Contents. Open Resources. Open AMT and there it is. Rename or delete it and try running the update again.

Hopefully this works for more than just me.

CS3 is really an exceptionally solid release, but Adobe seems to have completely dropped the ball on the installer. It’s hard to describe exactly how slow it is when things work right, should something fail and need to be re-installed you can kiss your day goodbye. In this case, I ended up losing the night as well.

The care and testing which went into the applications is badly served by a lousy installer, something should be done about this in the next point release. CS3 should not be stuck behind this abomination for the suite’s entire 12-18 month product cycle.

Some combination of screwy net access and a LiquidWeb mail server upgrade resulted in my Inbox duplicating all of the enclosed messages. Since I’m nowhere near inbox zero the glitch resulted in a few thousand messages to wade through. I figured I wasn’t the first to deal with this, and quickly found two scripts which id’d duplicate messages: Tim Auton’s Select Duplicates and Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts. I ended up going with Time Auton’s script because of his description and a quick review of his code. The script finished quickly enough (running from Script Editor) and left me with all the duplicated messages selected and ready to review and delete.

The LiquidWeb mail upgrade caused another problem, my IMAP folders were now grouped inside my Inbox. The solution was to add the IMAP prefix “INBOX” to the account settings, as shown here:

It’s an open source server supporting full read-write calendars, availability blocking, delegations, notifications, directory integration and more. I’m going to be setting up a few of these once we start migrating to Leopard.